Across the Asia-Pacific region, increasing numbers of women are migrating transnationally for low-skill work while their children remain in home communities, fostered by family or neighbours. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2014–15 in Lombok, Indonesia, this paper describes a sedentary child bias within Indonesian policies, and how this bias constrains migrant mothers’ choices regarding the care and well-being of their children. Vignettes describing the challenges of caregivers in Lombok families illustrate how the absence of social services, local forms of child fostering and limits on transnational adoption and child mobility together significantly curtail migrant mothers’ opportunities to arrange optimal support for their children while working abroad. The sedentary child bias in Indonesia raises issues around limits on the circulation of children that are relevant to the wider Asia and Pacific region, where temporary female labour migration and concomitant mother–child separation is on the rise.